Author Archives: Marissa Nicosia

[Ed. Note: Today’s post is part of Alyssa Connell and Marissa Nicosia’s “Cooking in the Archives” project, which launched in June 2014 with support from a UPenn GAPSA-Provost Fellowship for Interdisciplinary Innovation. Alyssa and Marissa are transcribing, adapting, and cooking recipes from Penn’s collection of manuscript recipe books. Visit their site to learn more about their project.]

One of the things we’ve been struck by along the way in this stroll through the culinary archives has been the similarity of certain recipes to many that we follow today. This holds true particularly for baked goods. (Except the notorious fish custard.) We weren’t quite sure what to expect from these “Shrewsbury cakes” – small cakes? Pancakes? Drop cookies? It turns out that Shrewsbury cakes are basically early modern snickerdoodles.

This recipe comes from UPenn MS Codex 625, a manuscript recipe book that belonged to a student in a London cooking school in the early eighteenth century. The pastry school was owned by Edward Kidder, who taught at a few locations in London between around 1720 and 1734. Codex 625 is particularly interesting as it was apparently sold as a blank book with a printed title page for use by students to write down recipes they learned. Kidder also published his recipes in a separate printed volume, Receipts for Pastry and Cookery, in 1720.

The Recipe

Shrewsbury Cakes.

Take a pound of fresh butter a pound of double
refind sugar sifted fine a little beaten
mace & 4 eggs beat them all together with.your hands till tis very leight & looks
curdling you put thereto a pound & 1/2 of
flower roul them out into little cakes

Using an electric mixer, cream together the butter and sugar. Then add the eggs and mix at medium speed until the mixture looks curdled. Sift together dry ingredients and add at low speed until just combined. Scoop and roll the dough by hand into 1-tbsp. balls, then pat flat. [You could also refrigerate the dough until it’s firm enough to roll out on a flat surface and cut out into rounds.]

Bake at 350F for 15-18 minutes (ours were about 1/3″ thick, so you could roll them thinner and have a slightly shorter cooking time) They’re done once they turn the slightest bit brown around the edges. This halved recipe yielded about two dozen cookies.

The Results

If you like snickerdoodles (and who doesn’t?), you’d like these. We added the cinnamon because we like it and couldn’t resist, and we thought it rounded out the mace nicely. These are mild, fairly soft cookies that are great with tea. We rolled and patted the dough into individual cookies because it was too soft and stick to roll out, but a little bit more flour and a stint in the fridge might make the dough easier to work with a rolling pin.

Any reader of this blog will know that the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts holds many unique books, manuscripts, documents, materials, and objects. But one of the most exceptional attributes of this collection is its accessibility. The center supports undergraduate courses from across the university community by facilitating class visits and coordinating individual research assignments. This post documents the experience of one class visit to the Kislak Center on the sixth floor of Van Pelt Library.

We met in the gorgeous, Victorian Lea Library to examine rare materials related to Shakespeare and early modern literature. After John Pollack, the Public Service Specialist for the center, warmly welcomed our class, he and Marissa Nicosia, our instructor, explained the proper procedures for handling rare materials. In preparation for our visit we discussed how early modern books were printed, made, sold, marketed, and read by their earliest readers. For this particular class meeting we read Margreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass’s article, “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text,” and the introduction to William Sherman’s Used Books.

To start, we examined the First, Second, and Third Folios of Shakespeare’s works. We compared these to printed works by Shakespeare’s contemporaries including the folio of Ben Jonson’sWorks(digital images), a playbook of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher’s play A King and No King, and a collection of George Wither’s poetry The Workes of Master George Wither.

Next, each student selected a seventeenth-century edition of one of Shakespeare’s plays, or his Sonnets, to examine in greater detail. The books on the table challenged us to look beyond the actual content of a book, to the book as an object itself, with a unique identity and history. For example, we considered who published, printed, and sold these books and where. We also examined ownership marks and other handwritten marginalia, as well the physical condition of the books including worm-holes, burns, paper texture, decorative bindings, marbled end paper, and even the smell.

A visit to the Lea Special Collections library provided the opportunity to engage with multiple points of history at the same time. Standing in a room built in 1881, touching texts from from the seventeenth century, and reading hand written notes from any time between then and now. It made one feel truly a part of a network.

The book examined, a 1630 copy of Pericles, offered its own insights and mysteries. Why, for example, is the title on the title page different from the title at the top of the first page of text? Similar, but different. And then there is the author, referred to as Wil. Shakespeare. Does this imply that he’s so well known that his full name is no necessary? But what is most intriguing is th scant, but present, marginalia. The handwriting is illegible (to me, at least), but seventeenth-century, according to Prof. Nicosia. The same hand numbered the pages on the top right hand corner of each recto page with Arabic numbers. The reader even drew a pointing hand to highlight one line of text.

It is exciting to have the opportunity to glimpse a small piece of the experience that someone else had in reading the text, particularly someone who may have been reading it soon after it was published. Could it have been the first owner of the book? Did they actually buy the book from Cheapside shop, at the signe of the Bible? What was the purpose of highlighting and annotating those passages? How did it fit into the context of the culture of his or her time?

The experience gave us a first hand way to consider all of the elements that converge over time to grow our idea of Shakespeare. This will continue to morph with time.

I found that many of the pages of The Historie of Henry the Fourth: with the Battell at Shrewsbury, between the king, and Lord Henry Percy, furnamed Henry Hotspur of the North had been trimmed, which left me to wonder if the marginal notations left by previous readers had been eradicated. The only evidence of marginality that had survived was a small notation on the title page stating “A Choice Play;” however, this leads me to hypothesize that the note only survived because to trim the play in this location would cut of the title as well. In addition, the title page was riddled with advertisements . The publisher claimed that this edition was “New Corrected by William Shake-Speare” even though he had already died years ago. Moreover, the popular character of Sir John Falstaffe was noted on the page as well. Also, while it is not usual for the bookseller to be noted, the exact location of his shop was stated. Combined, the title page’s primary role was sell you this editions and to continue your patronage with the publisher/bookseller.

This post is a collaboration between Adam G. Hooks (U. of Iowa) and Marissa Nicosia (UPenn) — and is cross-posted at Adam’s blog anchora and the Penn Libraries’ blog Unique at Penn. This started as another post in Adam’s “Breaking Apart” series, which has recently focused on leaf books (see here,here, and here). As you’ll see below, our collaboration started when we began comparing our libraries’ respective copies of the same leaf book.

Early Oxford Press, Penn’s three-volume set

This is a story of a bibliographic reference book that does not simply describe old books, but actually incorporates original leaves from those books, making it a unique and rare work in and of itself. Falconer Madan’s study of Oxford printing, The Early Oxford Press (1895), catalogs and provides bibliographical descriptions of books produced in Oxford up to 1640. As he had outlined two years before, in an address to the Bibliographical Society, a “perfect bibliography” would not only attend to the physical aspects of a book, but would attend to the historical and cultural context, as well–or, in Madan’s words, it would “set before the student so much of the life of a book as would give him … the place of the volume in the literature of its subject” (“On Method in Bibliography,” 91). As such, a bibliographer should “never rest content with the technical description only.” Madan went even further than this, though, arguing that “if possible, leaves from real books should be bound in each copy, to illustrate the actual printing of each decade or each quarter century” (98).

And indeed, Madan’s ambition was (at least in part) fulfilled: the first edition of The Early Oxford Press included specimen leaves from actual sixteenth and seventeenth century printed books. [1] Though some of Madan’s illustrative examples are facsimiles intended to exemplify different styles of book production, each copy of his book also included a sampling of rare material. In the preface Madan provides a rationale for the inclusion of this rare material, one of the “features of novelty” of his work. In his account, “actual pages of books printed at Oxford” were inserted, pages which were selected, as he is careful to state, “from works which are cheap and common” (vii). At this point Madan inserts a footnote, further justifying his method in opposition to the insertion of “separate leaves from rare and costly books” in a previous work (a collection of leaves from Swedish liturgies from 1879) which, as he curtly notes, was “a practice which cannot be approved.”

Rare Leaves – Penn’s copy

As Christopher de Hamel notes in his consideration of the often dubious ethics of leaf books, “most writers would say that the leaves being dispersed derived from a book that was already defective and fragmentary” (11). In Madan’s case, the books may or may not have been “defective and fragmentary” (although as you’ll see in a moment, there was a particular kind of damage in one of the books he used) but nevertheless they were “cheap and common,” which alone justifies breaking them apart. This makes Madan’s leaf book a limit case of the genre (especially since it is primarily a reference work) and de Hamel duly notes that Madan’s “austere bibliography” is “quite the least bibliophilic leaf book ever issued” (11).

Breaking Apart / Collaborating

When Adam posted on twitter that he had found a copy of a book on the open stacks with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century leaves (and later found two more copies of the book, one of which was also on the open stacks), I promised (on twitter) to track down Penn’s copy to see if ours also included rare materials. Sure enough, it was also on the open stacks with the rare leaves intact. On closer examination of two of the Iowa and Penn copies, Adam and I were able to establish a few points of contact. When we realized we had the chance to bring together leaves from texts that had been broken apart, we decided to collaborate.

As it happens, two of the Iowa copies and the Penn copy include leaves from the same books. According to the plan Madan outlines in his preface, the extracted leaves were systematically grouped and divided. The first 700 copies of the print-run included three leaves; beyond 700, at least one leaf was promised. Madan also provides a reference list of books from which these exemplary leaves were drawn.

click to enlarge

Penn’s copy (#366) and Iowa’s (# 371 and #456) are from the same subset (nos. 323-500) of the first 700 copies of Madan’s book. The third Iowa copy (#27) is from the first subset (nos. 1-200). [2]

I first encountered Ms. Codex 1552, Vade mecum, at a meeting of the English Paleography Workshop. A group of Penn librarians, graduate students, and faculty; scholars and graduate students from other institutions; area librarians, book-dealers, and other interested parties joined Amey Hutchins in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library on the sixth floor of Van Pelt for a special after-hours session.

This manuscript is a small, compact, portable volume that contains medicinal recipes. The volume also includes some Biblical verses and other miscellaneous material. One of the most interesting features of this manuscript is a pair of seventeenth-century poems that appear across a single opening near the end of the volume. Our Paleography Workshop persevered in reading the first poem on the verso by carefully deciphering the difficult script (a rushed secretary hand), decoding the topical references to Parliament and John Pym, MP and erstwhile head of the majority in Parliament, and discussing the place of that poem within a recipe book. Since then I’ve returned to the manuscript and completed my own transcription of both poems (included below). In my current research I’m interested in the ways topical or occasional poems rub shoulders with other kinds of texts in seventeenth-century manuscript and print culture. And in fact, I’ve discovered that this manuscript has had far more contact with the world of print than one would realize from first glance: both poems appeared in print during the seventeenth-century.

The poem on the verso, “We fasted first, then praid that warr might cease,” (f.115v) is firmly anti-Parliament.

We fasted first,then praid that warr might cease when prer woold not serue wee p[ai]d for peaceAnd glad we had it so, and gaue god thanks.which makes thy Irish play the Scottish pranksis there no god lett it put that to uoteis there no church some fools say so by roteis there no Kinge but pimm for to assentfor what is done by act of Parliamentno god-no Church, no king, then all were wellthat could but enact tyrannous hell

A full-text search on Early English Books Online revealed that the first line of this poem closely matches a poem included in a Restoration-era collection of seventeenth-century Royalist verse edited by Alexander Brome, Rump Songs (1662)[1]. In Rump Songs the poem is called “The Rump’s Hypocrisy” and the text includes some variations. While I would still agree with the Penn cataloger that this poem was likely composed in the early 1640s, it does also have an afterlife in a Royalist verse collection as well as in Ms. Codex 1552. Continue reading →

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Welcome to Unique at Penn, part of the family of University of Pennsylvania Libraries blogs. Every week this space will feature descriptions and contextualization of items from the collections of the University of Pennsylvania Libraries. The site focuses on those materials held by Penn which are in some sense “unique” - drawn from both our special and circulating collections, whether a one-of-a-kind medieval manuscript or a twentieth-century popular novel with generations of student notes penciled inside. See the About page for more on the blog and to contact the editor.

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